School Bus Ruch

Bus II (1975)

Akademia Ruchu (Academy of Movement), the pioneering Polish performance art collective, is in town for the Performa festival. I saw a few minutes of its Market of Toys, being performed in Times Square as part of the festival. It was a bit hard to pick out the AR gestures--pairs of volunteers holding long colored tape like police barriers--from the regular mayhem of the place.

In its prime, in the mid-1970s, AR's work was truly disruptive, socially and conceptually. In the piece above, Bus II, performers sat motionless for an hour in a bus abandoned roadside in a tiny village in the Bieszczady mountains. (In Bus I, the troupe gave a similar performance inside a Warsaw gallery but without the bus.) You can view videos of these and other AR performances on the ArtMuseum.pl Filmoteka. Included there is my favorite, AK piece, Happy Day (1976). 

Happy Day (1976)

In this very brief intervention in daily life, a busy corner of Krakowskie Przedmieście, something like the Broadway of Warsaw, is suddenly overrun with people in white and brightly colored clothing, including a bride running with her bouquet. They don't do anything that would be out of the norm on a New York City Street. But in Warsaw in 1976 it makes a bold (or bright) statement about the drab quality of life. (It hadn't changed all that much by the time I worked on the same street, just a few blocks to the south, 15 years later. It would, though, rapidly, with the onslaught of Western commercial culture.)